Arts watch.

Diabolically exciting Strong ensemble delivers...

April 30, 2000|By Lawrence Bommer. Special to the Tribune.

Diabolically exciting

Strong ensemble delivers intense tale of trip to dementia

`Red Giselle" marks a terrific Auditorium Theatre debut for St. Petersburg's Eifman Ballet. The title sounds like a Marxist version of Adolphe Adam's 1841 ballet. But like many works premiered by this aggressively theatrical, 33-year-old company, it is much darker--and diabolically exciting.

Putting equal emphasis on acting and dancing, wizard choreographer Boris Eifman enacts a chilling depiction of the life of Olga Spessivtseva, a Russian prima ballerina who suffered more from her art than for it. Her anti-romantic anguish indicts the elegant suffering of the imaginary Giselle, a peasant girl who loses her mind when aristocratic Albrecht deserts her.

Employing a musical witch's brew of Tchaikovsky, Bizet, Alfred Schnitke and a Charleston, this expressionistic tour de force reprises Spessivtseva's crushed career. (She fled the Soviet Union in 1923 and, after winning over Western audiences, succumbed to madness.)

Like Giselle, a role that Spessivtseva virtually incarnated, we watch this driven dancer (portrayed by Yelena Kuzmina) submit to cold coaching from her Teacher (elegant Sergei Basalev) and hot harassment from a leather-clad Secret Police Agent (Albert Galichanin).

Performing in Paris, she sinks into insanity, a breakdown triggered by a rejection by Serge Lifar, her homosexual Partner (the lithe and lyrical Igor Markov, a dead ringer for Leonardo DiCaprio). Here art imitates life imitating art: The pain flows either way.

Eifman wastes no steps on nuance. We're wrenched from the blue-and-gold Maryinsky Theater and its hothouse Imperial Ballet to the 1917 revolution, personified by hulking Bolshevik guards who brutally invade the theater. Offering thrilling proof of how styles of dance evoke ways of life, the Bolsheviks' peasant exuberance is locked in combat with the hapless classical movements of the frightened ballerinas. If history can become dance, this is it.

Spiraling downward, Olga is reduced to dancing a bittersweet pas de trois as her fickle Partner is drawn back to his male lover. Olga finds no shelter in a flashy Parisian nightclub: The frenetic flappers and lounge lizards intensify her isolation. Finally, trapped in the crazed visions of a broken ballerina, we see what Olga feels. Among the terrors, there's a hallucination in which the head of her brutal Secret Police Agent floats eerily in the air.

Moving inexorably from fragility to dementia, Kuzmina's Spessivtseva is painfully human, never more so than at the end: Surrounded by veiled wraiths and accompanied by Adam's original music, she is now Giselle in mind as much as art.

Unashamedly rhapsodic and powerfully pictured, Eifman's creation teeters on the brink of melodrama. Ultimately, it's too intense to be self-conscious. This hyper-imaginative storytelling will draw huge new audiences to contemporary dance. Its signal triumph is the ensemble: Their tensile strength fuels the stylistic contrasts classical and modern, folk and jazz, elite and proletariat-- that drive Eifman's captivating tribute.